Honor Watch 5 Ultra review: an Ultra-worthy build with a very basic UI

Honor Watch 5 Ultra: One minute review

The Honor Watch 5 Ultra is, from a hardware standpoint, a very good smartwatch indeed. It’s got a lovely 1.5-inch 466 x 466px AMOLED display, which is bright and butter-smooth; its case is made of titanium and its screen from Sapphire glass; it looks like a classic dress watch in the black aesthetic of my test model, but the fluoro band keeps things sporty – you could wear this for anything from wakeboarding sessions to weddings, and it wouldn’t be out of place.

It’s got a 480mAh battery that lasts around five days based on our tests – an impressive performance. The screen is pretty and the watch is intuitive to navigate, with health features that stand up to scrutiny. The digital crown, a feature often missed in non-Apple offerings, allows for easy scrolling.

So, will I wear it again? Unfortunately, no.

I love the watch’s design, I love its low price point, and I like the simple layout of its UI. I found it very useful, from the Find My Phone option to the sleep tracking. I think it’s a great watch, but ultimately undeserving of its Ultra moniker.

It tracks 100 sports, but most of these modes are very basic in their metric collection. There are no third-party apps, essential to customizing your smartwatch experience; you’re stuck with what’s installed on the watch out of the box. There’s no Strava, no Spotify, no WhatsApp, although you can view messages with the notifications functionality. The watch does have an NFC chip onboard, but it’s not designed to support banking payments. Customization options are limited to an (albeit generous) selection of free watch faces.

The end result is a watch that looks well designed from the outside, but which feels strangely hollow inside. In many respects it’s a high-performing and great-value device, but the lack of features makes it hard to recommend.

Honor Watch 5 Ultra: Price and availability

• Priced at €279 in the EU (around $300 / £235 / AU$480)
• Around the same price as the cheaper Samsung and Apple watches
• When and where you’ll be able to buy it is yet to be confirmed

The Honor Watch 5 Ultra is priced at €279 in Europe Union countries, which converts to around $300 / £235 / AU$480. That’s a great price for a watch with this build quality; it’s only a little bit more expensive than the Apple Watch SE.

However, Honor hasn’t yet confirmed when, or where, outside of the EU, you’ll be able to buy the Honor Watch 5 Ultra, due to international restrictions imposed on the brand similar to those on Huawei. We do know that it’ll be compatible with handsets running Android 9.0 and iOS 13.0, as well as the best Honor phones.

Specifications

Honor Watch 5 Ultra: Design

• Titanium and Sapphire glass
• Simple UI
• Digital crown

The Honor Watch 5 Ultra is, as mentioned above, an extraordinarily well-designed smartwatch (from a hardware standpoint) for its price. As well as high-quality innards like that great battery and powerful processor, the watch has a pleasant, unique octagonal shape with a grade 5 titanium case and bezel.

Sapphire glass protects the touchscreen, and together with the casing and fluoroelastomer band (leather is also available) this is certainly a watch that can withstand knocks, bumps and scrapes. I wore it non-stop for a week, and I was never worried about dinging it.

It looks like a premium dress watch, and the metal casing feels exceptionally premium – it’s certainly a better-looking watch than the otherwise comparable, and more expensive, Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra.

The watch has just one button, and the user experience has been vastly improved with the addition of a digital crown, which allows for easy scrolling. The Honor Watch 5 Ultra’s all-in-one button allows for an easy snapshot of your health, among other things, similar to Samsung’s body composition feature.

The fact that the magnetic charger is USB-A rather than the more powerful USB-C is a slight disappointment, but the fast-charging still works fine. Another disappointment is that there’s only one size; like many of its contemporaries, Honor is not taking into account those with smaller wrists.

Honor Watch 5 Ultra: Features

• 100 workout modes
• 8GB of storage
• No third-party apps or NFC payment

Things are a little more limited in the features department. With no third-party apps – which elevates the likes of the OnePlus Watch 3 from a nice curiosity into an essential wrist assistant – you miss out on deep interactions with everyday apps like Gmail, your maps service of choice, Keep Notes, Spotify, Strava, Komoot, your Wallet of choice, and so on.

The basic feature set is all you’re going to get. It’s not awful; you get notifications, call dismissal, on-phone music controls, 8GB storage for your music, which you can control with Honor’s native MagicOS Music app, but nothing terribly exciting.

The watch does have an NFC chip, but without a Wallet app you can’t really use it. I can view my WhatsApp messages on my wrist via the basic notifications service, but I can’t reply to them. You can see how my frustrations with the Honor Watch 5 Ultra were mounting during the week I wore it.

Things look a lot better from a health perspective. Honor’s suite of health and fitness features are good, with the new Health Scan feature first on the docket. It takes heart rate, blood oxygen and stress readings, collating them with sleep stats and your height and weight (which you input into the app) to check for outliers that could point to potential issues.

Sleep tracking is also great, with your sleep stages broken down in a similar manner to competitors such as the Samsung Galaxy Ring. The Watch 5 Ultra offers a Sleep Score with some additional insights based on how much sleep it believes you’ve had.

Workout support is solid, with over 100 sports modes, but very few of them offer more sophisticated metrics than heart rate and estimated calories burned. Running and swimming do offer specialized metrics, however, tracking pace per kilometer, stride length and stride frequency on the roads, while counting strokes and taking pool length into account during swimming.

Honor Watch 5 Ultra: Performance

• Some UI frustrations
• Good battery life
• Accurate workouts

I wore the Honor Watch 5 Ultra for a full week, testing it on runs, in the pool, and during sleep. The watch accurately estimated my steps, coming within a few hundred steps of my Samsung Galaxy Ring, and tracked sleep stages with similar accuracy.

I got a Healthy Morning Report and Sleep Score in the Honor Health app breaking everything down for me, with the usual insights – drink less caffeine during the day for better sleep, and so on – but Honor’s metrics and context are nowhere near as sophisticated as Samsung’s sleep animal chronotypes feature.

Run tracking served me well over the week, with all the usual pace, stride and speed features as well as GPS maps and elevation. A nice touch was a ‘fat reduced’ metric, telling me in one instance that my 8km run burned approximately 4g of fat. Swim tracking was also good, and the watch successfully identified my dominant stroke as ‘mixed’ as I swapped from front crawl to breaststroke during the workout.

The battery performed as described, lasting through around four and a half days of near-constant wear.

I’m happy with the performance here, but it would have been nice to be able to add to the limited features on offer with third-party apps. The frustration of not being able to use so many basic smartwatch functions with my phone made the device less useful, overall, than its competitors.

Scorecard

Honor Watch 5 Ultra: Should I buy?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

Also consider

How I tested the Honor Watch 5 Ultra

I wore the Honor Watch 5 Ultra for a full week, draining the battery down completely and monitoring runs, swims and strength workouts. I spent time using the UI to its fullest extent, testing the digital crown and button functionalities, and wore it as my daily driver. I also wore it to bed to examine its sleep tracking capabilities and tried the health monitoring metrics such as the new Health Scan feature.